Man, I wish I could pose as fast as she does and have my photos look as equally great! This model from eastern China can strike two poses a second. She also models a whopping 485 outfits a day. Now that’s skill!
Perhaps one of the most depressing things that can happen to a man who is looking forward to being a father is finding out that he is infertile. That’s what Adam Glogau felt after he and his wife tried for years to have a child, to no avail, and he fell into a downward spiral.
Glogau cuts a dynamic figure with glowing blue eyes and rimless glasses. Now 39, he is an eloquent speaker and a youth pastor at the Grace Downtown church in Winchester, Virginia, which is known for providing support to victims of the opioid epidemic. Six years ago, however, Glogau’s life was coming apart. He and his wife had fostered two children, but the arrangement ended badly, with the children going to another family. Then Glogau lost the job he’d held for seven years. “I felt like I was a failed father, I was a failed husband, and now I’m a failed man because I can’t keep a job,” he says. “It was whammy after whammy after whammy.”
Although men are just as likely as women to have fertility problems, ads for fertility treatment typically feature women holding giggling babies in the air or intimately touching a child’s face. Yet research suggests that reproductive issues have a profound emotional impact on men, too. Across the globe, masculinity is marked, in part, by the ability to have children — a demonstration “that you’re a fertile, virile man,” says Esmée Hanna, a sociologist at De Montfort University in the United Kingdom. In her research on men experiencing infertility, Hanna has documented feelings of loss, anger, frustration, and guilt.
With this rather woman-centric approach to the problem, many men suffer from infertility in silence.
Shadowed by taboo and embarrassment, the emotional experience of male infertility has been tucked away and ignored by the medical industry and often by men themselves. Compared with women, men are less likely to want to talk about their struggles, says Kelly Da Silva, a support coordinator at Care Fertility in the U.K. But men are now starting to speak out, and innovative practitioners are figuring out how to meet their needs. “You have to do it their way,” says California-based urologist Paul Turek. “You have to do it anonymously, quietly, and it has to be valuable for them.”.
And so maybe it is time to bring this medical field into the light and out of the darkness.
Know more about this topic, as well as the history of andrology, over at Undark.
(Image Credit: Bobjgalindo/ WIkimedia Commons)
Leonarda Cianciulli was a shopkeeper and a part-time fortuneteller in Corregio, Italy. She had lived a tragic life, including giving birth to seventeen children, thirteen of whom died in infancy or childhood. Cianciulli cooked, she made soap, she dabbled in matchmaking, and she was fiercely superstitious. And eventually she became a serial killer.
For Leonarda, everything changed in 1939 when Benito Mussolini began drafting young men to prepare for Italy's entry into World War II. Il Duce's popularity had slipped during the 1930s and the prospect of Italy entering the war on the side of Nazi Germany alarmed most Italians. Leonarda became mentally unbalanced at the thought of her favourite son, Giuseppe, being drafted and possibly dying in combat. The prospect of losing Giuseppe apparently led to her decision to carry out human sacrifices to preserve her son from death. As she would later state during her testimony, killing others would keep her own children safe by providing God with other deaths in place of her own children. Since she had four remaining children, she would need to sacrifice four others to keep them safe.
The killings were pretty gruesome. Cianciulli made cakes out of the blood of her first victim, and turned at least one into soap. Read the story of the "Soap Maker of Corregio" at Providentia. -via Nag on the Lake
Donna Porée left her apartment to spend the quarantine with her boyfriend on the other side of town. When she came back to her apartment three months later, she discovered an odd plant growing all over her apartment. Turns out she left behind a bag of potatoes before leaving her apartment, and in the span of three months, the potatoes have grown metre-long pink stalks that spread all over her flat!
image via Mirror UK
Australia is known for having weird and scary animals which vary in size and shape. This isn’t surprising however, because prehistoric Australia also had its share of frightening creatures. During the Paleozoic Era, between 541 and 252 million years ago, one of the largest marine predators to have ever existed on our planet roamed the waters of prehistoric Australia: the sea scorpions, Eurypterida.
Although Eurypterida looked broadly like scorpions (with a similar body shape, albeit built for swimming), they were not. They were more like the cousins of modern scorpions.
[...]
Sea scorpions include the largest marine predators to have ever arisen in the fossil record, including one species thought to have been more than 2.5 metres long, Jaekelopterus rhenaniae. Back then, some of these giants were effectively in the same place in their food web as the modern great white shark.
These likely agile swimmers would have used their large front limbs, armed with claws, to grab their prey, which they would then crush between the teeth-like structures on their legs (called gnathobasic spines).
While we’re not sure exactly what these large animals ate, it’s likely fish and smaller arthropods would have been on the menu. And if humans had been around swimming in the sea, maybe us too!
More details about this creature over at The Conversation.
(Image Credit: H. Zell/ Wikimedia Commons)
Until about 10,000 years ago, mammoths roamed mainland North America. Mammoths survived longer in other places, namely the Alaskan island of Saint Paul and the Russian island of Wrangel, where teeth have been discovered dating to only around 4,000 years ago.
St Paul is a volcanic island that until around 9,000 years ago was connected to the mainland by the Bering Land Bridge, which enabled animals to roam freely to and fro.
But as the climate warmed and sea levels rose, it became isolated – and the mammoths were trapped.
The good news was that the mammoths were the only large mammals on the island, and no predators were present on the place. And so the mammoths thrived on the little island for quite a time, until something about the lake changed.
Dr. Beth Shapiro, a paleo-geneticist, explains to us the events behind the extinction of the mammoths on the Alaskan island of St. Paul, and what we can learn from this event in prehistory.
More details about this over at Big Think.
(Image Credit: Thomas Quine/ Wikimedia Commons)
Need a smile today? Check out these photos of a bird beside a mushroom, which kind of imitates photos of women holding umbrellas. The bird stands proudly on what seems to be a log, and poses for the camera. Suddenly, the rain began to pour, but thankfully there were flat-top mushrooms in the area which the bird could use as an umbrella.
Cute!
Via 9GAG
(Image Credit: Tierfotografie Tanja Brandt/ 9GAG/ Facebook)
Back when playthroughs and guides for games weren’t available on the Internet, people would seek guidance from a friend, sibling, or a manual of the game. If you didn’t have a knowledgeable person to consult or a manual, you can get stuck in a dungeon or level for days. The Legend of Zelda for the NES is a game that is full of cryptic puzzles and riddles that can take you a while to figure out. Philip Summers is an artist who is known for sketching his own walkthroughs for classic games like the first Legend of Zelda game:
True to its name, every single sketch of Link, every item, enemy, and map is hand-drawn and every string of words is handwritten. Philip's drawings and words give new life to the game and the land that encompasses it. To be able to see it through this new lens is a pretty magical experience.
The first few pages cover the characters, enemies, items, and a brief rundown on how to play the game. The rest of the guide then covers the overworld and its dungeons. Each dungeon spread features a map of the dungeon and shows off a few of the monsters you’ll find, along with an extremely detailed sketch of the dungeon boss. Seeing these originally 8-bit bosses in this sorta detail is really something to behold. Each dungeon section is also bridged together with story segments and tips on where you or Link should travel next. At times it feels like you’re reading a storybook, the way that Philip has managed to connect together the sections of the game. The book also comes with a useful fold-out map of Hyrule, complete with a key on the side detailing locations, heart containers, and other secrets.
image via nintendolife
A group of people riding on their boat spotted a bear struggling to get a plastic container off its head. Watch how these people were able to help the bear remove the container with precision and care! They did it on the spot too!
image screenshot via Reddit
Actress and comedian Kristina Wong formed a team of volunteers to make masks during the pandemic. Wong launched a Facebook group called the “Auntie Sewing Squad.” The squad has more than 800 members, and they have distributed more than 55,000 masks to communities in need. CNN has more details:
Wong is proud of the group. But she is also frustrated.
"I do refer to our group as a 'sweatshop' because I don't want to romanticize it. While we are enjoying each other's company in this very strange time in history, we shouldn't have to be doing this work. This is absolutely the government's job. We should not have had to turn our homes upside down into sweatshops and pull the sheets off our beds to make masks."
image via CNN
Liam introduced his girlfriend Jessie to Star Wars and shared her recap with us. Then they went on to the next movie, The Empire Strikes Back. Months later, she retells what she recalls of the story. While the details are funny, her memory of the plot and storytelling sequence is amazing. I couldn't retell scenes with that much detail of a movie I'd seen yesterday, much less months later. There must have been quite a bit of discussion during the screening; otherwise, how would she ever retain the name Bossk? They've also now seen Return of the Jedi together, so expect an animated recap of that one in a few months. -via Digg
I will always admire the Japanese people for their great attention to detail, their faithfulness to the source material, and their ability to breathe life into fictional characters and places. Check out Japan’s Super Nintendo World, which is Nintendo and Universal’s upcoming Mario-themed area for Universal Studios Japan.
There’s just a stunning attention to detail. Coins rotating in sync! Hidden pipes! A menacing Pirhana Plant! A stack of Goombas! An angry Thwomp! Yoshi!! Every time I watch the video, I see some clever new feature that I had missed before.
[...]
And to give you a better idea of how Super Nintendo World compares to other attractions in the park, here’s a zoomed-out photo showing the Harry Potter-themed park nearby:
Now that right there is just pure dedication.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: Attractions Magazine/ The Verge)
6/29
— 29Qu (@29QuP2) July 1, 2020
パークフロントホテルから見たSUPER NINTENDO WORLD
3/31にも見ましたがかなり出来上がっている
オブジェクトもいろいろ動いていたし点検も行っている様子
オープン延期にはなったけどエリアに入れる日まで気長に待ってます#USJ#USJファン #SUPERNINTENDOWORLD pic.twitter.com/GMPGxa48sr
Two years ago, Weird Al Yankovic released his "Hamilton Polka." Now the song has a video, made from the relevant clips in the Hamilton movie now streaming on Disney+! Of course, the speed had to be altered to keep up the accordion's polka beat. And before you ask, Yankovic always gets permission. He even asks permission when it isn't required. -via reddit
In the year 1475, the city of Trent in what is now northern Italy was ruled by prince-bishop Johannes Hinderbach. He was approached by the father of a two-year-old boy named Simon who had gone missing on the evening of Good Friday.
Searches ensued and by Easter Saturday suspicion had lighted on the small Jewish community in the city. The chief magistrate, Giovanni de Salis, had the households of the three main Jewish families searched, but Simon was not to be found. Then on Easter Sunday Seligman, a cook in the household of Samuel (a moneylender), discovered Simon’s body in a water cellar on Samuel’s extensive property. As all historians agree, the body had clearly been planted there. Samuel could have fled but had, up until this point, enjoyed an amicable relationship with the city’s authorities. So, instead, he “trusted the system” and reported the discovery. He also insisted that all members of the community stay put, including visitors who just happened to be in town for the Jewish Passover. That Samuel came forward and complied with the authorities was never mentioned in the ensuing trials.
That didn't matter, and eventually all of Trent's Jewish men were burned at the stake, all the women were imprisoned for years, and locals went on a campaign to make Simon a saint. Even the pope got involved, too late for the Jewish community of Trent, and too late to stop a deceased toddler from becoming a symbol of antisemitism for centuries. Read the story of Simon of Trent at The Daily Beast.
For almost 70 years, it has been accepted that Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Now there is speculation about whether another expedition in 1924 was the first. If so, it would not negate Hillary and Norgay's achievement; it would just lengthen their title to the first expedition to reach the summit and return alive.
Around 1pm on 8 June 1924, George Mallory, one of the era’s leading climbers, and his young companion Andrew Irvine, were spotted as tiny black specks clinging to Everest’s towering Northeast Ridge, just a few hundred metres from the summit. And then the clouds closed in. Irvine has never been seen since, while Mallory’s frozen corpse was finally found in 1999.
Their unfinished story is mountaineering’s greatest mystery. That they died on the mountain over 90 years ago isn’t in doubt, but what exactly happened up there, on the roof of the world, has been argued about endlessly by alpinists and armchair observers for decades.
Did they reach the top of Everest – 29 years earlier than Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay’s accepted first ascent of the planet’s highest peak – before tragedy struck?
When Mallory’s perfectly preserved body was discovered, the photo of his wife that he had sworn to leave on the summit was the only thing missing. That and a Kodak camera carried by the climbers, which remains lost – presumably buried in the ice with the as yet undiscovered remains of Irvine. That camera is the Holy Grail of the adventure world.
Read about Mallory and Irvine and that 1924 expedition, from the reports of the survivors and what we've learned since then, at HistoryExtra. (via Damn Interesting)
(Image credit: Nationaal Archief)
